


dum memor ipse mei

by NeverNooitNiet



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drama, M/M, Memory Loss, Pre-Fall shenanigans, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-03-26 13:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19006720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverNooitNiet/pseuds/NeverNooitNiet
Summary: There is something, Aziraphale thinks, that is inherently selfish— unangelic, even— about grief.But then of course, the same could be said about love.





	1. in spite of

“What did you look like?” Aziraphale asks one night, when they have both had too much to drink and are huddled together on the angel’s well-worn leather sofa. “Before, ah…” he waves a hand loosely in Crowley’s direction, the burning yellow eyes that have come uncovered at some point, and the demon arches an eyebrow. 

Aziraphale asks him this sort of question every now and then; what Crowley was like Before, what rank of angel he was, what he remembers. It has not escaped Crowley’s attention that this sort of question seems to pop up whenever Aziraphale feels himself crossing some invisible line, whenever he needs to realign his unexpected lack of distaste for Crowley with his stubbornly entrenched worldview. 

Aziraphale, he thinks, has come to the same conclusion that he has: that the two of them are fundamentally cut from the same cloth. But rather than accept that they are both in between, both slightly other— because that, of course, would require some acknowledgement of Aziraphale’s own wrongdoing, his shortcomings as an angel— how much easier, then, to attribute it to Crowley’s celestial origins, and absolve himself of any responsibility. 

And Crowley gets it, of course he does, he’s terrified out of his fucking mind half the time, whenever he allows himself to consider just what Down There might do to him if they understood the extent of his transgressions. 

But Aziraphale desperately wants some sort of tragic figure, a foolish, misguided angel, because that he could understand, or pretend to, and so Crowley is equally determined not to give him one. 

Aziraphale is a bastard. Crowley knows this, likes it, even. But this particular brand of bastardry, the angelic  _ thoughtlessness  _ of it all, is one he thinks he could live without. 

Crowley sighs, and takes a deep swig of wine. 

“Well, I mean,” he says lazily, “pride  _ is _ a sin, and all that, but all the same Below didn’t quite have mirrors back then.”

Aziraphale nods. There is something to the tight set of his face that suggests he realizes that this topic might be, ah, distasteful, but he pushes on anyway. 

“And… before? That is, really Before.”

Crowley doesn’t dignify this with a response, just shoots Aziraphale a flat, hard look, before going back to the all-important business of seeing just how much wine the human body is capable of consuming without stopping for pesky things like air. 

But Aziraphale keeps looking at him in that awful way of his, pitying and patronising at the same time, and Crowley sighs and relents. 

“No fucking clue. Happy?”

This is, more or less, what he tells him every time, and it is both a lie and not a lie. He doesn’t remember Heaven, not properly. It’s just that he hasn’t quite forgotten, either. 

His first real, clear memory, his first memory as  _ him _ , is of Falling, screaming and broken and desperate, and it is as sharp and vivid now as it was 6000-odd years ago, head over heels and trailing singed feathers and fire everywhere. Before that, it’s just… fog.

It’s not forgetting, but it’s not remembering, either. It’s vague, no specifics, no name or rank, nothing, Crowley supposes sardonically, that could be used against Heaven. But it isn’t, in itself, nothing, and sometimes he wonders whether that would be better or worse. To have it all be gone,  _ tabula rasa. _ Because all he has now are feelings, vague and indistinct, the impression of a person long gone. He knows why he Fell, more or less, because he can feel the confusion and the dissatisfaction and the burning knowledge that something wasn't quite right, that he was out of place, and along with that— a naive sort of hopefulness, maybe, that things could be better. But he doesn’t have the logic, the reasoning, or even the moments right before, the thing that actually triggered it. And it’s not… it’s not that he’s forgotten, not really, because it feels as though it’s just on the tip of his tongue. 

He knows he’d recognize it if he heard it. His name. He just can’t think of it himself. Or want to, if he’s being perfectly honest. He doubts it would fit him any better than Crawly used to. 

Occasionally, very occasionally— and Crowley can admit to himself, by this point, that it’s mainly when he’s around Aziraphale, on long, lazy evenings in the half-dark of his shop where it suddenly doesn’t seem so inconceivable to move slightly closer, to press up against the soft curve of the angel— he feels as though there might have been someone else. Another angel. The ghost of lips on his, of hands intertwined. 

Crowley knows enough not to miss Heaven. But when he does get— wistful, as it were, that’s what he longs for. That… companionship. He doesn’t know what would be worse: for that other, nameless, faceless figure to have Fallen, or for them to have remained. 

He supposes it doesn’t matter anyway. That it can’t have been all that perfect, anyhow, or he surely wouldn’t have Fallen. Or perhaps they would have Fallen together, would have been together. Either way, it does no good to dwell, because whatever did happen, that nameless figure is long gone. 

And he loves Aziraphale, loves him stupidly and irrationally and deeply, and he knows it’s love, because he remembers the feeling. And he would do almost anything to hear Aziraphale say that he loved him, but he will not play the weeping lost soul, the tragic hero. 

There’s a difference, isn’t there, between a demon and a fallen angel, and Crowley knows damn well which side of that line he’d rather be on. 

Because here’s what Aziraphale will never understand: he doesn’t regret it. Falling. He hates Hell, yes, bitterly; but he hated Heaven too, he knows that much. And at least this way, Crowley found out for himself. He  _ did _ something, exercised whatever pathetic facsimile of free will it is that he possesses. 

And maybe the Fall— that moment of being in between— is as close as he’ll ever get to being human. Maybe. 

Time, as it is wont to do, passes. 

The world fails to end, and suddenly he and Aziraphale are spending more and more time together, and Aziraphale seems to have stopped asking that sort of question altogether. And it is… nice. And it feels, for the first time, like maybe they don’t have to be an angel and a demon. Like maybe they can just be Aziraphale and Crowley, and that will be enough. 

And that’s really all he’s ever wanted. 

And then he walks into the bookshop one afternoon, and Aziraphale is sitting on the sofa with the strangest look on his face, and for one awful, lurching moment, Crowley thinks that he’s being recalled. That Heaven are going to punish him for stopping the apocalypse, or for trying to, at any rate. That—

And then Aziraphale opens his mouth, and slowly, carefully, he says a name. 

Crowley forgets it the second he hears it, but he recognizes it, of course he does, because it sparks through him, burning his nerve endings, and it feels as though he’s being pulled back— though through what, he couldn’t say, like Falling in reverse. 

And for one jarring, frozen moment, less than a heartbeat, it all slots back into place, name and face and place and rank, another hand, held firmly in his, and then it’s all gone again, pulled out of existence, out of his mind and he 

does

not 

care. 

Crowley stares down at Aziraphale in abject horror, because despite the rapidly ebbing tide of memories, despite the fact that he is still solidly, steadily himself, for better or worse, as he looks down at the hunched figure of the angel on the sofa, face alight with something like expectation and something, Crowley thinks with no small amount of dread, that might even be heartbreak, he is hit by a sudden realisation. 

Is it remembering, or is it deduction? It is both, in a way; it’s that awful look on Aziraphale’s face, the way that even if the precise syllables of his name slide off his mind, the way that Aziraphale said them, with such care, as if they might shatter on his tongue, remains: as if they’re something precious, intricate spoken pearls. And it’s the feeling of two sets of fingers, intertwined, bursting with sudden, stark clarity against the transient mists of most everything else from back then. A feeling most terribly similar to their clasped hands, back at the airbase, shaking and solid and  _ warm _ and the one clear, fixed point as the whole bloody universe seemed to be collapsing around them. 

The other angel, the nameless, faceless figure that’s dogged his dreams all these long millennia… well, it’s Aziraphale. 

Well, of course it is. 

And Crowley doesn’t do what he wants to, which is to scream or swear or cry or perhaps all three at the same time, but he blessed well comes close. 

It’s not a happy realisation. Maybe it should be, Go— _Someone_ knows there are worse angels to have been in love with— Gabriel springs to mind.  But all the same, it’s… Crowley feels terribly exposed, all of a sudden, feels used, almost, because— because he never meant to fall in love with Aziraphale, didn’t choose it, of course he didn’t, it was irrational and _dangerous_ and couldn’t help but be unrequited— for it to have been anything but, he would have had to actually tell the angel how he felt, and of course he’s never had anything like the courage for that, spineless fucking snake that he is. 

But it was his love, for all that. It was  _ his _ , private, as against acceptable demonic behaviour as it was possible to get. In a perverse way, he’d been almost proud of it: proud that he was able to feel love, that he was more than just Hell’s lackey. That this made him closer to being human, somehow. It had been  _ his.  _

And now it turns out it’s not his love, his feelings, after all, just some dusty remnant of an angel who he’s not. An angel who’s been dead for six thousand years, really. 

All this time, and he’s still Heaven’s fucking puppet. Still can’t do a blessed thing, can’t even fall in  _ love  _ on his own terms. 

That’s ineffability for you, Crowley supposes. The Great Bloody Plan and he’s tired, so incredibly tired, of being a cog in it. 

And, hang on—

“How long,” he says, voice flat and hollow and perhaps a tad smaller than he’d like it to be. “Angel. How long have you known?”

Aziraphale still won’t look at him, not properly, but something in his face seems to break, then, the soft lines of it crumpling in on themselves. He remains deathly silent, and Crowley’s heart seems to have forgotten that it’s really only there for decorative purposes and is thudding desperately against his ribs. 

“Aziraphale,” he says, and he says, and there is something desperately wobbly to his voice, “please tell me you’ve only known for a few days.  _ Please. _ ”

Aziraphale looks up at him, then, brown eyes meeting black lenses, and Crowley doesn’t know if that look on his face is joy or sadness. 

“I…” he breaks off, swallows, starts again. “Well, I’ve suspected for a little while, but I only really—” his voice cracks, then, but Aziraphale soldiers on. “— so you  _ are _ him, then?”

There is something so longing and hopeful to his voice, and Crowley hates it, hates this, hates himself and wishes he could hate Aziraphale like he’s supposed to. 

“ _ No _ ,” he says, and he shocks himself with the venom of it. And it’s a lie, and it isn’t, because he’s not. He hadn’t been that angel for millennia, or maybe he was never him— they could have been completely separate entities, for all Crowley knows, with only a few shreds of common emotion binding them together. “How long?”

Aziraphale looks down at his splayed hands, his immaculate fingernails. 

“It’s— well, ever since the whole apocalypse, I’ve sort of started to— to piece it together. And then I was certain a few weeks ago.”

Crowley nods slowly. A few weeks, months, maybe, then, not long, in the grand scheme of things, not for them, but long enough that all the time spent together recently, since Adam was good enough to restore Aziraphale’s bookshop, feels… tainted, somehow. 

But it’s not what he desperately fears, that Aziraphale has always known, these long six thousand years, that whatever this mess of their relationship is has been built on lies and things he’s forgotten, that it’s never really been anything to do with him at all. 

Bad as this is, it’s not that, and Crowley is pathetically grateful. 

He’s still standing, and he’s not quite sure how, how his legs haven’t given out yet, but the only place to sit would be on the sofa next to Aziraphale, which feels terribly wrong now, for all sorts of reasons. Crowley sighs, and looks over at the bookshop door, the night outside, and wonders if he ought to just sort of make a break for it. 

“Do you remember?” Aziraphale asks after a little while, voice so terribly soft. 

“No,” says Crowley, still looking at the door. “And I’m not going to. Nor do I want to, to be perfectly fucking honest.” 

He doesn’t need to look at Aziraphale to feel the small hurt emanating from the angel.

“Is it such a terrible thought, then?” asks Aziraphale, remarkably composed given the quiet bitterness in his tone. “That you might once have been in love with me?”

And that, really, just about does it. 

“Are you taking the piss?”

Aziraphale blinks, almost cartoonishly. 

“I—  _ what _ ?”

“D’you know what’s terrible?” Crowley asks, tone icy, and he can just  _ feel _ his hiss getting ready to claw its way to the surface, as it always does when he gets upset, “The fact that we’ve known each other for six thousand years, and you won’t even consider the possibility that I could be in love with you now.”

And Aziraphale looks up, eyes wide and impossibly hopeful, and he opens his mouth and Crowley knows exactly what’s about to come out, that he’s going to say again, and he doesn’t think his shattered mind can take it. 

He flinches before the barest whisper of sound can leave Aziraphale’s mouth. 

“ _ Don’t _ ,” he says wretchedly. “Don’t call me that, all right? It’s not— it’s not me, not anymore, and I need you to understand that.”

“But you feel love,” Aziraphale says, a tad unsteadily: he’s stood up at some point, and is standing across from Crowley with the oddest look in his face. “You shouldn’t— you love  _ me _ .”

“Yes,” Crowley says, “me.  _ I _ love you, all right? Not some angel who’s been dead for six millennia.”

Aziraphale takes a step closer, places a hand on Crowley’s suited arm. It’s soft, immaculately manicured, of course, and the exact small sort of contact that Crowley would normally be desperate for, only he’s a little too busy having a nervous fucking breakdown to notice. 

“But you  _ are  _ that angel, deep down. Demons don’t love, and angels are beings of it— and you love me, you’ve said so— and you clearly remember something…” Aziraphale trails off, tone desperate, hand clenched on Crowley’s arm. 

Crowley pushes it off. 

“Beings of love,” he repeats, voice acid. “Beings of— how fucking  _ ironic _ , then, that I love you, and you don’t love me.”

“Of  _ course _ I—” Aziraphale starts to protest, and Crowley just laughs, high and manic, eyes stinging. 

“You don’t love me,” he says, and it  _ hurts.  _ “You’re in love with a six thousand year-old ghost, but he’s gone, all right? He’s gone, and I’m what’s left, and I am a demon, and I love you as a demon, and I’m sorry—” he’s going very fast now, might be shouting, even, but he has to get it  _ out _ , “— I’m so terribly fucking sorry that that’s not good enough for you.”

Crowley turns to leave. He can hear Aziraphale following behind him, breath coming in little gasps, but it’s suddenly terribly important for him not to be looking at the angel’s face just then. 

“ _ Wait _ ,” says Aziraphale, desperate, his hand on Crowley’s shoulder, and it would be so easy to turn back, to lean into the easy contact, but pride, after all, is a sin, and Crowley is quite determined to stick to it, because the alternative really is far too pathetic. And for the second time that evening, Crowley pushes Aziraphale off.

“Crowley, please,” says Aziraphale, and he’s almost at the door, almost—

And then agony flashes through him, and he knows Aziraphale’s said it again, and it feels god-awful, reams and reams of memory dumped into his mind and then ripped out again in a fraction of a second, feels like lurching over the landing of a dark stairwell, searching for a final step that simply isn’t there.  

All of this hurts less than the knowledge that the last six thousand years of their relationship clearly haven’t mattered at all to Aziraphale, not in the way that they have to him. That he’s just the stand-in, a parasite, almost, a poor replacement for the person that Aziraphale really loves. 

That he’s just a demon, after all. 

Crowley whirls around, eyes burning with tears or hellfire or both. Aziraphale looks horrified, smaller, somehow, than Crowley has ever seen him. He cannot quite bring himself to care. 

“ _ Fuck _ you,” Crowley spits, and then he storms out. 

It ought, he thinks, to be raining. Or properly dark, at least, so that he can stalk off into the night. It’s neither of these things— a proper summer evening, clear and oppressively hot, not even dark yet.  From his Bentley, knuckles tense and white on the wheel, he slowly unclenches one hand and gives a two-fingered salute to the perfectly blue sky. 

Heaven isn’t up there, not really, it’s on an altogether different metaphysical plane. But it makes him feel slightly better, all the same. 

And then Crowley drives— not to his flat, the sterile emptiness, not just yet. He can’t stomach it. He just drives, until he finds a suitably quiet back alley, where he can be alone for a little while. 

And then and only then does Crowley finally let himself cry in earnest.  

  
  
  
  



	2. because

Aziraphale, of course, remembers everything. 

Well, sort of. 

He remembers Heaven perfectly well— there’s no reason why he shouldn’t, not with centennial reviews and discorporations and paperwork all conspiring to drag him away from his books and back up at each opportunity. Perhaps more pertinently, Aziraphale remembers Heaven from Before, and he would say, as any angel would, that it is vastly unchanged.

This is both true and untrue: Upstairs are a rigid, intransigent lot, and their methods and ways of thinking remain largely identical, even after the Fall, even six long millenia later. And yet Aziraphale knows too, somewhere, that this is wishful thinking, although on whose part, he could not say: on his, most likely, trying to stave off those awful, lingering doubts. To latch onto whatever it was from back then that prevented him from Falling. But all the same, there is something in the stretched-out smiles of his superiors that tells him otherwise; a metaphysical layer of dust, an intangible tarnish. The way the stark whiteness of the place has stopped feeling pure and started feeling empty. 

And he is hopelessly unable to speak for the other angels, but Aziraphale, at any rate, has spent the last six thousand years being quietly afraid. 

He remembers Heaven, in the beginning. He remembers everything that has happened there, even the things which he would rather forget. And so he remembers, of course, that there used to be… someone else. Someone he was, ahem, rather intimate with. 

Someone he loved— loves?— and whom he misses most terribly. 

The problem, then, is that Aziraphale cannot remember that person in the slightest. 

Ineffability, in the end, is about balance. And so it simply wouldn’t do to strip all of Hell’s agents of their memories, leaving Heaven with perfect maps of their vulnerabilities, likes and dislikes and desires. He has the events, knows what they did together, and he has his own tangled web of emotions, and from all of this he can piece together a not insignificant portion of their relationship. 

But he does not have _him._ This other angel— well, surely no longer an angel now. It is a terribly disconcerting thing, to remember with perfect clarity one’s first kiss, the bashful self-consciousness and the giddiness of it all, the inexplicable warmth and _safety_ of being in the arms of another, and yet for that other to be little more than a vaguely humanoid spectre in his memory, a fuzzed shadow where a face, lips should be. 

He remembers being happy _._ He doesn’t quite know why. 

But Aziraphale doesn’t like to think about it, because it hurts, that loss, the forgetting. Because it’s a shameful thing, to be associated with an angel who Fell, especially if it was _that_ kind of association. Because if he digs too deeply into the veil of hurt that he has drawn around himself, the fact that this other angel betrayed him, _left_ him, he’s terribly afraid that he’ll find just the opposite to be true. That he was the one doing the betraying, by remaining.

There is something, Aziraphale thinks, that is inherently selfish— unangelic, even— about grief.

But then of course, the same could be said about love.

It is best not to dwell. And whatever his other faults may be, Aziraphale has always had an innate gift for lying to himself. 

And so he— doesn’t forget, not really, he just stops thinking about it, pushes the whole matter, the whole of Before to the back of his mind. 

And life goes on. 

And then there is Crowley. Aziraphale will freely admit that he has, over the millennia, grown... fonder of the demon than he perhaps ought to be. He certainly never intended for it to happen, but, well, he has been created to love all of God’s creation, even snake-eyed demons, and so he’s long since slotted his lack of hatred for Crowley quite neatly into his tidy little view of the world, and moved on. 

The problem is, he’s supposed to love in a great, vague, all encompassing way, really, not in a wondering-what-those-clever-fingers-would-feel-like-in-his-curls sort of way, in marvelling at the sharply ironic curve of Crowley’s lips. 

And this, as hard as Aziraphale tries, is a little more difficult to explain away. It’s— well, it’s partly circumstance, certainly, but there’s more to it than that. He thinks. 

How does one explain one’s reasons for falling in love? Crowley is… oddly enticing, a mess of contradictions, graceful and awkward, petrified of Hell and yet bolder in his infractions than Aziraphale would ever dare to be. Beautiful, with his slit-gold eyes, kind and stubborn and sharp and sarcastic. Impossibly, intricately human.

But it’s a dangerous path to go down, falling in love. Especially with a demon who cannot hope to love you back. 

Because he _can’t_. Aziraphale knows he can’t. Demons don’t love, it’s a cardinal rule. And if he observes little… idiosyncrasies in Crowley’s behaviour that seem to suggest otherwise, surely that’s just his own wishful thinking, his desperately lonely mind playing tricks. 

Well. That’s the nice, poetic explanation, the one that paints Aziraphale in a noble, tragic light. Because if that’s not the case, then the comfortable black and white lenses through which Aziraphale views the world will shatter. Then he might actually have to face up to what he’s done— or more to the point, what he hasn’t. 

Either way, he knows it’s best to keep some distance between himself and Crowley, because it’s so difficult to properly gauge the depths of his own feelings, because try as he might to suppress them, it’s whenever he thinks of Crowley that his lost love really begins to haunt him. He worries, sometimes, that all he’s trying to do is replace one fallen angel with another, to use Crowley as a substitute for what he lost. It feels— unfair, unfaithful, almost, although to whom he could not say. Because he has no way to know, really, whether his hopeless infatuation for Crowley is love or just loneliness. Who all of these feelings are _for_. 

Better for them both in the long run, Aziraphale thinks, if he leaves well enough alone. 

He has human lovers, of course, but that’s different: there’s a certainty to the transience of it which is both beautiful and bittersweet. It is _meant_ to be fleeting, and all the more precious for it. There and then gone. 

But he and Crowley and the blurred spectre of his angel, they are eternal. The Greeks were right, when they spoke of different sorts of love. Because the love that he wanted from his angel— that he desperately wants from Crowley, but will not let himself have— is immortal. 

He has lost that immortal love once, and he is certain that if he and Crowley were to become… involved, that he would lose it again. That Heaven and Hell would never allow it. And Aziraphale does not know if he could survive that loss a second time. 

He doesn’t want anything to happen to Crowley because of his own foolish selfishness. He doesn’t want to think about this, because it _hurts_ , and so he pushes it down, and he doesn’t.

Until...

The problems don’t begin with the end of the world, or the surprising lack of it. The problems begin about three hours later, as Aziraphale, exhausted and alone in his miraculously restored bookshop, takes his first nap in what must be a good three hundred years. 

The problems start when he dreams. 

Aziraphale does not, as a rule, sleep: he has never been able to take quite the same decadent pleasure from it that Crowley does, and then the demon’s hundred-year nap rather put him off altogether. But the past eleven years have been hopelessly exhausting, and Aziraphale is so surprised by his continued existence that he doesn’t quite know what he ought to do with it. 

And so he sleeps. And so he dreams. 

It’s a simple dream, really, him and his angel, wings out. The glint of a smile, the curve of a feather. Long, clever fingers carding over his primaries in a quiet sort of intimacy. Turning around, quite suddenly, a joke, laugh lines around—

Aziraphale wakes up, heart in his throat, and with the sudden, burning memory of a pair of bright amber eyes.

 Eyes that bear a staggering resemblance to a certain slit-eyed pair he’s grown rather fond of, over the millennia. 

But surely not… 

They don’t look _that_ similar, Aziraphale tells himself. The eyes from his dream are— well, he’s loathe to use the word _human_ , given the circumstances, but they are certainly more of the shape one would expect, with whites and round, perfectly ordinary pupils. They are warmer, too, more of a burnished orange than the sharp yellow-gold he’s become so used to.  

And who’s to say that it’s a real memory, anyway, and not merely his subconscious twisting at things? It’s… well, it’s fantastically improbable. 

 _Or ineffable_ , Aziraphale thinks, but pushes it down, because really, what are the odds?

It’s a coincidence, or a dream, or both, and so he moves on. 

But it unsettles him, just the same, gnaws at his nerve endings, this half-remembered romance, perpetually on the tip of his tongue. The details of his dream are, in true dream fashion, wispy and intangible, but the _feeling_ of it has lodged on his chest, heavy and solid and painful. The feeling of being whole, at peace. In love. It pulls at him, that feeling, and Aziraphale’s never been one for resisting temptation. 

Besides, he wants to see what other details he can remember. What he can find.

Well, he has to know, now, because the thought is there, each time he looks at Crowley. Because if it _is_ him, then it puts whatever it is that they have in an entirely different light. 

He puts it off, for a few days, because his book is terribly interesting, because he won’t quite let himself go down this route. And then he sleeps again. And again, the following night. The night after that. Gets into the routine, almost as a human might. Or as Crowley does. 

And he begins to remember. 

It’s little things, flashes, and at first Aziraphale is doubtful but the details are so minute and inane that he cannot see quite how his subconscious might conjure them up— the arc of a smile, a self-conscious laugh, Heaven’s uncanny light playing off dark hair. 

As far as he can theorise, whatever it was that had stripped away his memories had only been designed to last six thousand years— well, why should it have needed to be in place any longer? It wouldn’t have mattered, one way or another. 

Aziraphale wonders, with a dread lurch, if Crowley can remember anything, now. 

He holds tight to his little scraps of memory and sometimes he thinks it’s Crowley and sometimes he’s sure it isn’t, and in the meantime he pulls the demon closer anyway because in some strange way he’s never been more desperately lonely, because it’s been six thousand long years and everything is breaking down. 

And then one night he has a name. 

And then, of course, he has everything. 

It’s Crowley. Of course it is. And if anything, Aziraphale feels relieved. A sort of numb acceptance. This is… well, he doesn’t have to choose, now. Leave anyone behind. And it means he can… apologise, maybe. Put things right. 

It’s only now, in the sudden, oppressive emptiness of the bookshop, that Aziraphale realises he really hasn’t considered Crowley’s own feelings on the matter at all. 

He stares at the door with a heavy, sick feeling, as though Crowley is going to come running back in at any moment, because Aziraphale thinks he would rather have more shouting, hot and sharp, rather than the silence that presses tight against him. 

He sits, stands, paces a bit, sits again. He really has no idea of what he ought to do. What Aziraphale _wants_ to do, sort of, is to get absolutely sloshed out of his mind, but drinking, for him, has become so inextricably associated with Crowley, over the millennia, that he can’t quite bring himself to do so. 

This is bad, he knows. Whatever else, Crowley is his _friend_ , and Aziraphale has hurt him, even if he can’t quite understand how. The look on Crowley’s face as he had walked out, grief and anger and something like betrayal, maybe, the way he’d flinched when Aziraphale had said— that name—- like it had actually, physically hurt him to hear it. 

Maybe it had. Aziraphale hasn’t exactly stopped to consider anything along those lines, anything other than his own pathetic tangle of feelings. 

Aziraphale stands up, decisively. He needs to find Crowley. To… sort this all out, somehow. 

He hasn’t the foggiest idea what he is going to say. He’ll figure it out on the way. 

Aziraphale decides to try Crowley’s flat first. He walks. It’s a nice enough evening, he registers distantly, and he needs the time to try and sort out— whatever it is that he’s feeling. 

What had he honestly been expecting? That he would say the name, like some kind of magical key, that Crowley would remember everything and just sort of fall into his arms?

Well, sort of, he thinks uncomfortably. He had been expecting this revelation of his to smooth everything over, to give him both the love he lost so long ago and his love for Crowley, to absolve him of having to make any sort of choice. 

And Crowley is a _person_. Not human, certainly no angel— he’s made that abundantly clear— but still, a person. Who can feel and hurt and— love. He might as well admit it. 

If Aziraphale is terribly, brutally honest with himself, he knows that Crowley is in love with him. He’s always known. But knowing something and accepting— or admitting, maybe— that thing are quite different processes altogether. 

He couldn’t admit that Crowley loved him, couldn’t allow himself to reciprocate those feelings, because that would require some admittance that Heaven’s rhetoric is flawed, would require some conscious action on his part. Would require him to… rebel, just a little, in a way that feels deeper than eating copious amounts of sushi or hoarding old books, in a way that he doesn’t know if he can justify to himself. 

Aziraphale, for all his faults, is not stupid. What he is is _ignorant_ , and willfully so. He has to buy wholeheartedly into the great plan, into Heaven, because if he doesn’t, it’ll all come crashing down. Six thousand years of doing things that while Right certainly didn’t feel particularly right, or good, at the time. Six thousand years of petty insults and assumptions and each and every time he has blamed the demon for something that he knows, deep down, is not his fault, because it’s _convenient,_ having Crowley as a scapegoat. It stops Aziraphale from ever having to consider the consequences of his own actions because he knows, somewhere, that if he were to strip away the layers upon layers of self-righteousness and stubborn, ridiculous faith he has wrapped around himself like a shield, he wouldn’t like the person he found very much. 

He owes Crowley an apology. Quite a few apologies, actually. Aziraphale quickens his pace. 

The Bentley, to Aziraphale’s very great relief, is parked haphazardly on the pavement in front of Crowley’s flat, an almost certain indicator that Crowley is inside. Good, Aziraphale tells himself. This is good. No need to go chasing all over London. Now he just has to go up to Crowley’s flat and explain himself, and everything will turn out all right. Hopefully. Maybe. 

Aziraphale pulls open the door to the apartment building with perhaps just a touch more force than is strictly necessary, and up he goes. If he uses a very minor miracle to ensure that the lift arrives immediately, no one is there to remark on it. 

He takes a deep breath, and slowly makes his way to the door of Crowley’s flat. Aziraphale does not come here often— Crowley moves and redecorates and generally just changes things so often that the bookshop has become a far more natural meeting point. A constant. Aziraphale has a tendency to latch onto things, books and snuffboxes and clothes, to try and cultivate some sense of familiarity in a really very rapidly changing world, but he knows that his only true constant, the only being around with any sort of consistency for these last six thousand years, has been Crowley. 

He knocks on the door. Twice. The knocker is ridiculous, a gaudy silver snake thing, and Aziraphale can’t even bring himself to roll his eyes at it. There is no response. 

“Crowley?” Aziraphale calls, tentatively. Then: “Please?”

“Piss off,” comes the reply, somewhat muffled by the still closed door, but just hearing Crowley’s voice, knowing he’s there, helps ease some of the tension from Aziraphale’s shoulders. Only some, but it’s a start. 

“Look, I just— I just came to apologise,” he says, and tries to push down the small quiver in his voice. 

“You can apologise from out there,” Crowley says, words doused in an almost clinical air of detachment. Aziraphale sighs. He was expecting this, sort of. He certainly deserves it. But he can hear the hurt in the demon’s voice, and Crowley doesn’t deserve that. And he still believes, somehow, that if Crowley would just let him in, let him explain, it might be all right. 

“I’m sorry, Crowley, you know I am. I— oh, look, would you please just let me in? I just want to be sure that you’re all right.”

“Perfectly fine,” comes the acerbic response. “Happy now?”

“No,” says Aziraphale. It comes out in a much smaller voice than he had intended. 

“Me neither,” Crowley replies, in a softer tone than before. “Now _leave_ ,” he adds hurridley, and with renewed prickliness. 

Aziraphale closes his eyes for a moment and leans against Crowley’s door, allowing himself to imagine the demon on the other side of it, so close and yet so terribly far away. 

“You aren’t exactly making this easy,” he mutters, more to himself than Crowley. The demon, unfortunately, has always had remarkably astute hearing.

“I’m so terribly sorry,” Crowley says. “Am I in-con-fucking-veniencing you?” He hacks the word into its syllables with brutal efficiency. 

“That’s not what I…” Aziraphale begins, and then stops. He is, quite suddenly, exhausted.

Aziraphale, even at the best of times, is not the most possessing of the qualities of, say, patience. Or tact, for that matter. And it has been an incredibly stressful night, and every single word spilling out of the angel’s mouth is wrong, wrong, wrong, and he is just about at the end of his tether. 

“Anthony J. Crowley,” Aziraphale says tauntly, “would you _please_ open this door and let me in, or— or I am going to _make a scene_.”

“Oh, _no_.” Crowley’s voice practically oozes sarcasm. “How very terrible for me.”

“It will be,” Aziraphale says, with a lofty sort of confidence he seems to have miracled up out of thin air. “It’ll completely ruin your image for all these humans, here. Not to mention your houseplants, if they caught wind of it.” 

There is a moment’s silence, then a heavy, resigned sigh, and then Crowley is pulling the door open, all the while very deliberately avoiding eye contact with Aziraphale. 

The sight of him startles the angel. His sunglasses are off, and there is something about the red lining to his eyes, the terribly human blotchiness of his face… demons are not supposed to cry. Angels certainly aren’t, and if anything, Aziraphale presumes that the other side would have even less use for it. 

Crowley does. Effusively. He cries at films and plays, at the fall of empires and the deaths of friends, whenever he allows himself to have them. But this is the first time, Aziraphale thinks uncomfortably, that Crowley has cried because of _him_. 

Well, no. Probably not, if Aziraphale thinks back to every cruel and baseless thing he has said and done to Crowley over the millennia, the centuries upon centuries of ignoring Crowley’s patently clear emotions simply because it wouldn’t suit Azirpahale’s worldview, because he might have to actually _think_ about some things for himself. This probably is not the first time Crowley has cried over him.

It’s just that this is the first time that Crowley has let him see. 

That uncomfortable feeling grows stronger, and Aziraphale follows Crowley into his flat feeling distinctly uneasy. 

“Learned my name, then, have you?” Crowley says gruffly as he strides into his flat, pointedly still not looking at Aziraphale. “Only taken you about six thousand years, apparently.”

“ _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale tries, but the demon ignores him, just keeps on walking, snakeskin shoes tapping on the marble floor. 

They reach what Aziraphale supposes passes for Crowley’s living room, although it’s as barren and blatantly unlived-in as the rest of the flat. Crowley gestures vaguely at a sleek white sofa that looks as though it has cost more money than Aziraphale’s entire bookshop. 

“Sit, if you like,” he says dismissively. Aziraphale does. Crowley remains standing, across from him, and only now does he deign to look at the angel, arms folded securely across his chest. He doesn’t speak. 

“I _am_ sorry, you know,” Aziraphale offers, although the words feel weak and meaningless, somehow, when faced with this sudden, terrible emptiness between them. 

Crowley nods. 

“Right,” he says. “ _Right._ And what, exactly, is it that you think you’re apologising for?”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale says slowly, desperate to get the words out right, “because I know you love me.” He looks up at Crowley and gives the demon a humourless smile. “Crowley, I’ve known that you love me for hundreds of years.”

Crowley flinches, but says nothing. Aziraphale takes a deep breath, and continues. 

“And I’m sorry,” he goes on, “for never acting on that, or— or letting you know, at the very least. For making you feel like I didn’t love you back. Because I do,” he adds, and it’s imperative that he makes Crowley understand this, “Of course I love you, my dear.”

Crowley looks down at the floor. 

“Not enough to tell me, apparently.”

“Too much to tell you,” Aziraphale says fervently. “You have to understand, I was terrified. If Heaven found out—”

“You would Fall,” Crowley intones, voice flat and disconcertingly empty. “You would be like me.” He laughs, high and cold. “I can’t think of anything worse for you.”

“I can remember the Fall, now,” Aziraphale says softly, trying to stave off the sting of Crowley’s words, wishing he could just— smooth over Crowley’s pointed sharpness, soothe him, hold the demon in his arms and tell him how much he cares for him. He can’t, and it’s his own fault. But what he can do is talk, and so he does. “Remember it properly, I mean. I— I came very close, I reckon,” he says, stumbling over the words, because he has never admitted this, not properly, not even to himself. “I had all the same doubts, the same questions that you did. You were just a bit more… vocal about them. And then when it really counted, I stayed quiet.” _And you didn’t. And you Fell_ , he thinks, but does not say. 

Crowley sighs, picks at his fingernails. 

“And therein lies the problem, you see. Not me. Not me _at all_.” He looks up and meets Aziraphale’s gaze, slit pupils narrowed into almost nothingness. “And so if that’s the person you love, then perhaps it’s for the best that you didn’t tell me.”

“I love you both,” Aziraphale says softly, and this time it is he who cannot quite meet Crowley’s piercing gaze. “I always have.” He gives a quiet laugh. “Only I’m terribly selfish. And I could never— I was terrified of losing one of you. Foolish of me, of course. I lost him six thousand years ago.” He looks up. “But _please_ , Crowley, don’t let me lose you too.”

The silence that follows is deep and pervasive enough to make Aziraphale’s heart race. Should he— should he do something? Speak, stand, move, he doesn’t know, anything to wipe that horrible blank look off Crowley’s face. 

It is Crowley who speaks first, in the end. 

“‘S my first proper memory, the Fall,” he says, suddenly terribly fascinated by his own reflection in the gleaming floor. “That’s when I started being me, I reckon. Before that, it’s…” he shrugs miserably. “I can remember feelings, sort of, but they’re… they don’t feel like _mine_.”

Aziraphale winces, slightly. _Oh, Crowley…_ it certainly doesn’t sound like the most pleasant way to come into existence. The Fall had looked really rather awful from above. 

“I remember everything that happened,” he offers. “And my emotions, too, but y— _he_ was just… a blur.” 

“So what changed?” Crowley asks, voice still small and flat but with a touch of real, open curiosity to it which makes something flutter, deep within Aziraphale’s chest. 

“I started to dream,” he says simply. “After the world didn’t end. And I started to piece things together, sort of.”

They went quiet again, for a moment, but it felt less strained, this time, and more… contemplative. 

“I’m sorry for—” Aziraphale begins, then breaks off. “I understand, sort of, now. Better than I did, at any rate.” Crowley inclines his head in response, a few stray strands of dark hair falling in front of his face, and in that moment there is nothing that Aziraphale would like more than to be able to cross the space between them and push them back. 

“Do you hate him?” Aziraphale blurts out, quite suddenly, and it’s a strange sort of question to ask, he is dimly aware, but all the same he really does need to know. 

Crowley blinks, an unusual enough occurrence on its own, and thinks this over. 

“I don’t regret it, you know,” he says slowly. “Falling. I mean, it wasn’t _fun_ , obviously, but… I mean, how often do we get to make a choice, do anything significant, anything that’s not just following the great bloody plan?” Crowley stops for a moment, takes a deep breath. “So no, I don’t hate him. Don’t know him well enough for any of that, I reckon.”

Aziraphale nods, slowly. Quite suddenly, an awful thought occurs to him.

“And… do you hate me?”

Crowley looks up, sharply. 

“ _What?_ ”

Aziraphale can’t meet his gaze again, so focuses on the sofa instead, running an idle hand over the leather. It really is dreadfully fancy. 

“I wouldn’t blame you, if you did,” he says, and it’s true, he deserves it, and he’s trying so very hard not to cry, even though he probably deserves that as well. “I’ve been so terribly cruel to you, my dear.”

“Oh, don’t be _ridiculous_ ,” Crowley snaps. “Of course I don’t— angel, do you have any idea just how much more straightforward my life would be if only I were able to hate you?”

“Ah,” says Aziraphale, unsure if this is a good thing or not. 

Crowley snorts, turns smartly on one heel, and strides out of the room. Aziraphale dithers for a moment, debating whether he ought to follow or not, but Crowley comes back almost instantly, a bottle of wine and two glasses balanced precariously in his slender arms. 

“Budge over,” he tells Aziraphale, who obliges and can’t suppress the warmth that spikes through him at the sudden, wonderful nearness of Crowley. 

The demon passes him a glass. 

“Drink?”

Aziraphale smiles, despite everything. 

“Thought you’d never ask.”

And so they sit. And so they drink. And it’s nice, of course it is, and considering the state Crowley had been in when he left the bookshop, it’s a minor miracle of its own. It’s only… something Crowley said keeps sticking in Aziraphale’s head— the talk of choice, and significance. 

Because really, what has Aziraphale ever done? He is over six millennia old, and has done very little of any real, sticking value in all that time. Averting the apocalypse, he supposes. Or trying to, at any rate— he is willing to concede that others may have made more significant contributions on that front. 

Holding Crowley’s hand at the airbase, he thinks, is certainly up there— in fact, more or less every single action he has ever taken that he would class as _significant_ , that mattered in some way or another, has involved Crowley in some way. 

And that, maybe, is precisely the point. 

Aziraphale sighs, and supposes he owes Crowley one final apology. 

“I was happy,” he starts haltingly, “When I realised that you… used to be him. But for all the wrong reasons,” he adds hurriedly, catching sight of the look on Crowley’s face. “Because it simplified things for me, I suppose, because it meant that I could… rationalise it all away, loving you. Because it meant that I didn’t have to think, or question, that I could go on happily following a system that I know, deep down, isn’t _right_.”

“Oh,” says Crowley, a touch shakily. He takes a deep swig of wine, as does Aziraphale.

“What I’m trying to say is,” Aziraphale tries, “is. Is that you make me… question. And change. And that yes, things would probably be significantly easier if I just hated you, but they’d be duller, too.” He pauses for breath, and is surprised— and a little concerned— by the wet shine to Crowley’s eyes, but the demon is smiling, too, wide and achingly genuine, and so Aziraphale smiles back, tentatively, and continues. “I haven’t done all that much that I’m proud of, I suppose,” he says wryly, “or that’s not just what the Plan— or Gabriel, more to the point— expected of me. But if I were to kiss you now…” he pauses, mouth dry. “Well. Well, I would class that as fairly significant, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d say so, yes,” says Crowley, somewhat faintly. For a heartbeat, neither of them moves, and then all at once, they are both surging forward, mouth on mouth, and Aziraphale’s hands are in Crowley’s hair and it’s clumsy and awkward and giddy and _wonderful_ , and it is a good long while before they break apart. 

“What happens now?” Aziraphale asks, finally. Crowley shrugs.

“You’re the one with all the memories,” he says, with just a twinge of bitterness.

“Well, yes,” says Aziraphale, “but… that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? And we were different people, then.” He gently weaves Crowley’s fingers through his own. “Both of us,” he says decisively.

The look on Crowley’s face, Aziraphale thinks, is very nearly wonderful enough to make up for hundreds upon hundreds of years of wasted time. 

As it is, they have plenty of catching up to do.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much for reading! xxx

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! Title is from the Aeneid and means something along the lines of ‘while I recall my very self’.
> 
> Just a little reminder that I won’t be watching the tv series (or reading the script book either for that matter) until after my exams have finished on June 17th so please please please don’t tell me spoilery things xx


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